Historians Quotes

Study men, not historians.

— Harry S Truman

“Good historians...have the future in their bones”

— Edward Hallett Carr

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

— Voltaire

“Historians are great gossips at a high level.”

— Marian Schlesinger

Heart and head are contrary historians.

— Jerry Spinelli

Most historians are engaged in fiction.

— Peter Morgan

“I began with the desire to speak with the dead.”

— Stephen Greenblatt

History never repeats itself, historians do.

— Lee Benson

“No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for "Before Coffee.”

— Cherise Sinclair

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

— Julian Barnes

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

— Margaret Atwood

Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.

— Craig Brown

The idea that historians aren't affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

— Kwasi Kwarteng

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

— Colum McCann

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

— Peter Greenaway

Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.

— Michael Beschloss

Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of…

— David Christian

If historians of philosophy are to be divided into those who focus on discontinuities and those who focus on continuities, I belong…

— Gail Fine

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does…

— Anonymous

In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility…

— Anonymous

The idea that historians write the definitive version of something that will last for all time is less current than it used…

— Norman Davies

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which…

— Ibrahim Babangida

When we're trying to solve difficult national issues its sometimes necessary to talk to adversaries as well as friends. Historians have a…

— Madeleine Albright

I have made a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't…

— George W. Bush

Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need…

— Steven Van Zandt

Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of…

— Saul David

I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell…

— Boyd K. Packer

Too many so-called historians are really 'hysterians'; their thinking is more visceral than cerebral. When their duties as citizens clash with their…

— Thomas A. Bailey

What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more…

— Thomas Piketty

Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and,…

— Arnold J. Toynbee

“The moment historians examine the past they risk changing it, by selectively re-arranging events, consciously or not, according to the judgment(s) of…

— Paul Ham

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that…

— Anonymous

That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact.…

— Polybius

Historians of a generation ago were often shocked by the violence with which scientists rejected the history of their own subject as…

— I. Bernard Cohen

“Ancient historians like Josephus the Jew, Berosus the Chaldean, Hieronymus the Egyptian, Mnaseas, and Nicolaus of Damascus (Josephus even mentions these last…

— Ken Ham

I want my children to have access to something that looks beyond what I call the tyranny of now. You read the…

— Oliver Stone

“I know quite well why I became a historian… It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't…

— Penelope Lively

I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.…

— Edward R. Murrow

“Reference to the deadness of the past is a way of staking a claim on it. But historians must be open, as…

— Robert A. Orsi

“Historians often minimize or discount the impact that any one individual can have on human destiny-and for good reason. Given the broad…

— Kevin Fedarko